15 thoughts on “Release: President Forever 2012 v. 1.2.8”

Hey, I’ve noticed that there is a bug in the game where there is a large distinction between the popular vote and election day results. If i play a test game where i’m doing no campaigning for the entire game, before the election the map will predict that I will lose all the swing states. However, I still end up winning some of the swing states. Shouldn’t I have a landslide loss, if I do absolutely no campaigning and lose all of the debates?

There’s a huge error in declaring the winner. It seems that if the race is really close the irst. Person to touch 270 is declared the winner even it the states go back towards the loser in the end. For example, I played as Obama and even though I got 285 votes the race was called for Romney because some states flipped back at the last second.

Also Nevada reported its electoral votes to Romney even though I won the popular vote in the state.

I am having the same issue with projected and election results in the 2012 scenario. For example, when playing as Romney for the Republicans, the day before the general election the polls predict the following:

Also- when you play in the 2016 scenario it doesn’t list Mitt Romney as a potential candidate for the GOP nomination? What if Romney won in 2012 and was now seeking a 2nd term?

Further, I think there could be glitch in the primaries for 2012. I was playing as Romney with Gingrich as my main challenger and even though I actually won Iowa and New Hampshire it didn’t seem to shift the national race, which still had me down by like 20 points.

Whereas in previous games I’ve played in the 2008 version you tend to see a momentum shift your way after early state victories. I went on to secure victories in Florida, Arizona, Nevada. maine and Michigan, but it still comes up as Gingrich winning, even though he only won South Carolina like in real life.

I had a great ground game set up for super tuesday, but Gingrich ended up smashing me by winning Ohio, Virginia etc and taking the lead in delegates. Also, it didn’t matter how much debate prep I did (and I did a lot) I still scored like -5 everytime.

I think that winning in an early primary as one of the minor candidates like Huntsman, Bachmann or Perry in 2012 should definitely give a bigger boost to the nationwide polls. Also, I think if a major candidate like Gingrich loses their home state, especially by a large margin, that should deal a big blow to their campaign. I’ve had several games where I’ve beaten Gingrich and Georgia and Romney in Michigan or Massachusetts, but their polling numbers hardly changed.

I just played a test election I played as human Perry vs Human Obama. As Perry I demolished Obama with ad after ad and campaigned constantly in the swing states. As Obama I did nothing at all, no ads, no campaigning. Going into election day I was predicted to win with 388 electoral votes and all of the traditional swing states showed red for me. I ended up losing the election 287-251. Please fix this.

Will you be adding Michael Reagan and other surrogates for Newt Gingrich, such as JC Watts, Terry Spence, Fred Thompson, Herman Cain, Linda Upmeyer, and Kellyanne Conway? It seems a bit bland to just have Callista Gingrich while others have a lot.

Recent purchaser (though I also had p4e 2004 and p2000) here. I’m working from v1.26, but I don’t see changes to what I’m listing below in recent updates. I have some extensive feedback, with apologies for the length. No need to respond, but I hope some of it is helpful.

1 Bug: I often got ‘index out of bounds’ errors accessing the endorsers’ page during the primary. The content is inaccessible, but I am blocked from accessing anything else, so I have to crash it and reload from autosave.

Feature/Interface suggestions:
Primary-related:
1. In the turn summary/recap, upcoming states are listed in alphabetical order, not in order of the next state up, which would be more helpful.

2. The debate prep dialog from the candidate activities area offers a different format of countdown from the turn summary/recap screen. For example if it’s march 4 and there’s a march 5 debate, the summary will say “debate in 2 days” while the debate prep screen will “debate in 1 day”. It’d be clearer to just pick a consistent countdown method throughout.

3. In ads, when focused on a particular state, it’s hard to cease running the ad. You have to go out of the state mode, into the national mode, go to run, disable it. It should be easier to stop the ad even if focused on one state (pressing the run ad button should toggle the ad in state mode).

4. I frequently got no news stories for double digit wins in strings of primary states, even when there wasn’t much other news to speak of. Contrarily, President Obama (in 2012 scenario) managed to occasionally get positive headlines from winning strings of *uncontested* states. I understand there is some randomness involved, but I think your headline logic could use some priority tweaking.

5. Endorsers. I ran a Newt primary run on normal difficulty. Well after I had a runaway victory on my hands and even after securing the nomination, Mitt Romney, my one remaining foe, continued to ring in ALL the endorsements. Because of the aforementioned bug, I couldn’t access the endorsement screen and lobby after a couple months, but I would think electoral success would advance those numbers faster and electoral failure would slow them pretty dramatically for another candidate. It’s not that no one endorses a loser, but it does affect mainstream endorsements, and there’s no way the AI Mitt in this case had enough CP to overcome what would have been the real life impact on those endorsements and sweep them all.

General Election:
1. VP debate should have option to focus on a presidential candidate, either their running mate or their opponent’s running mate. In real life getting bogged down discussing yourself in a VP debate is a missed opportunity. All debaters should have the option to focus on general election opponent when known (ex. if opponent is uncontested). Newt did this to great effect in the 2011 debates, rocketing himself out of obscurity by being generous to his primary opponents and tough on the President.

2 Would like to see an option to automatically schedule debate prep and issue knowledge, with a snooze option if a particular day ends up being bad for it. Extra helpful if you’re playing through the primary. Simply having prompts in the recap isn’t enough, and the auto option would be like having a campaign manager prompt you.

3. Would love for the CP Usage dialog (Accessed from the main screen, top right near candidate picture/summary) when showing ground ops/targeting etc to display turns completed out of the total (ex 5/10) so I know when those CP points will be available again without having to hunt the info down elsewhere.

Great game, love the primary setup generally. I’m still playing through my first primary, so depending on how it goes I may be back with more feedback.

I noticed Obama almost always gets Trump’s endorsement. I don’t understand how Obama would get it, Trump and Obama have been enemies for a while, and yet Obama never fails to pick up his endorsement for some reason.

I recently played a 2016 scenario as Chris Christie and even though I used a few of my PIP and CPs to attract a few endorsements, I didn’t get a single endorsement from anyone,instead Paul Ryan seemed to get them all. And when it was clear that I had smashed him in the primaries, he still kept getting endorsments. I even saw endorsements popping up for him after I had accumulated enough delegates to be the nominee… I don’t see anyone endorsing a candidate after they’d lost, no matter how hardcore they are!